Nearly 90 years after Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific, a veteran pilot claims he may have located the wreckage of her Lockheed Electra 10E, using nothing but Google Earth.
Justin Myers, a pilot with over two decades of flying experience, says satellite imagery of Nikumaroro Island reveals a dark, straight object measuring exactly 39 feet, the precise length of Earhart’s aircraft. The discovery has reignited interest in one of aviation’s greatest mysteries, though official responses to his findings have been largely nonexistent.
Myers’ investigation began after watching a documentary about Earhart’s final flight. Instead of searching for answers in archives, he opened Google Earth and tried to imagine where he would attempt a forced landing if he were in her position, lost, low on fuel, and desperate.
“I was just putting myself in Amelia and Fred’s shoes,” Myers told Popular Mechanics. He focused on Nikumaroro Island, a remote coral atoll in the Pacific that has long been a focal point for Earhart researchers. What he found gave him what he described as a “mild little shiver”.
Zooming into a flat stretch of reef where he believed Earhart might have attempted to land, Myers spotted a “dark-colored, perfectly straight object”. Using Google Earth’s measurement tool, he discovered it was approximately 39 feet long, the exact length of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E.
“It looked man-made,” he said. “It looked like a section of aircraft fuselage”.
Days later, he claims to have found additional debris nearby: what appeared to be a partially exposed radial engine measuring 4 to 4.5 feet in diameter, and a half-exposed wheel. The dimensions, he says, align with the Electra’s specifications.
Myers suggests natural forces may explain why the wreckage hasn’t been spotted before. He believes weather systems periodically bury and expose debris on the reef, and he simply happened to catch it during a window of visibility.
“There was an element of luck in spotting that aircraft debris, as Mother Nature had revealed what had been buried on the reef for a long time,” he wrote in a blog post.
Despite the compelling measurements, Myers has struggled to get anyone to take his findings seriously. He filed a report with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau after the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said the matter was outside its jurisdiction. He also contacted Purdue University, which holds Earhart’s personal archives, and an expedition company in California.
No one responded.
The reluctance to investigate is understandable. In 2024, a high-profile expedition led by former Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo captured sonar images that appeared to show a plane with Earhart’s distinctive twin tails near Howland Island. A follow-up expedition revealed the object was nothing more than a natural rock formation.
Purdue University, meanwhile, has already planned its own expedition to investigate a different anomaly on Nikumaroro known as the “Taraia Object”. With resources already committed elsewhere, Myers’ claim has struggled to gain traction.
Myers is careful not to overstate his case. He isn’t declaring the mystery solved—only that he has found something worth investigating.
“The bottom line is, from my interests from a child in vintage aircraft and air crash investigation, I can say that is what was once a 12-metre, 2-engine vintage aircraft,” he told Popular Mechanics. “What I can’t say is that is definitely Amelia’s Electra.”
He adds that even if the wreckage isn’t Earhart’s, it could still resolve another aviation mystery. “This finding could answer some questions to someone who disappeared many years ago.”
For now, the objects on Nikumaroro remain unverified. A planned 2025 research trip to the island was postponed until 2026, leaving Myers’ discovery in limbo. Whether anyone will fund an expedition to investigate a pilot’s Google Earth search remains uncertain.
What is clear is that the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, the most enduring in aviation history, continues to captivate. And for one pilot with a laptop and a curious mind, the answer may have been hiding in plain sight all along.
